How big is your US Mail mailbox at home? What would happen if you read your mail, but returned it to your mailbox? It would get increasingly stuffed and tax the ingenuity of your mail carrier until one day there would be no way to bring you your mail. If you got a bigger mailbox, you would only delay the problem.
Electronic mail suffers from the same limitations. There is only so much disk space allocated to your inbox, and a message that won’t fit will be returned to sender. So, unless you delete or choose some other place to store mail you’ve read (“refiling”), first large messages and then even small messages can’t be delivered to you.
Even with the best management, some faculty receive large attachments, and only a few of them are sufficient to strain email capacity. NACS is piloting a Web-based file sharing system that will provide a means of collaborating on large files superior to using attachments.
Instructions for using several popular mail reading programs can be found at http://www.e4e.uci.edu/email/handouts.html You can check your disk space usage and limits at http://www.e4e.uci.edu/cgi-bin/check_quota.cgi